Go with the previous version before this release, 40.24
While getting a handle of the basics of the game you really won't miss out on any of the new features in the latest version. They're at a somewhat more advanced level and you'll be spending your time trying to figure out the menus and how to not die of starvation and thirst, and less concerned with what instrument bards should play.
I don't think specs are ever going to be perfect. Simply because the people typically writing specs (project managers, user experience designers, business analysts etc.) view the requirements through a different lens than a developer.
In my experience the best solution is for them simply to be available to the developers to answer questions that arise in a timely manner.
That might follow the pattern but it breaks a bunch of typical user story rules. It's easy to blame the format, but it sounds like the product owner needs to be educated on the process.
I pay a similar amount sharing with two friends in Clapham/Balham. It helps that we've been in the same place for 4 years so the rent hasn't gone up too much over that period.
It can. Although my understanding is that if one side purposefully generates high costs then they can get in a lot of trouble for doing so.
It's also worth noting that the UK is lowering the amount of fees you can get back. There's an upper limit on the percentage of fees you can get paid by the other side. This is essentially to introduce a higher cost to litigation through the courts and encourage sides to settle or go through an arbitration process.
Interestingly one of the most well known figures in the Starcraft scene, Sean 'Day[9]' Plott, yesterday announced that he was working with a browser based game company on a new RTS.
To get a great flavour of dwarf fortress in a longer written form. You can't go wrong with boatmurdered, which is a game where each player took a year (I think) of playing the fortress and then handed on to the next player to pick up the pieces and carry on.
http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/
Well without a contract (even a verbal agreement) in place for them to refer to in court, as a case it seems pretty thin. It also seems like the lawyers will make more out of this than any of the parties.
But there's no reason why when asked to do the work, you couldn't say I'll do it for a price and see how the employer responds.
All an IQ tests, is your ability to do well on an IQ test.
It's not a particularly great measure of intelligence. The fact that you can often improve your IQ by 20 points (or more) just by practicing the types of questions that turn up should be evidence of this. Did you just become massively more intelligent relative to the population in the 2 days you spent practicing the questions?